325 Quotes by Ben Aaronovitch

Whatever was in the sandwiches, you didn’t want them getting too warm and going off, or starting to smell, or spontaneously mutating into a new life form.

It took the Fire Brigade a day and a half to secure the remains of the house enough to recover Crew Cut’s body, which was described by Dr Jennifer Vaughan as ‘suffering from crush trauma’ and by Dr Walid as ‘mostly flat’.

You never said you used to play Dungeon and Dragons,” Lesley had said when I explained my reasoning. I’d been tempted to tell her that I was thirteen at the time, and anyway it was Call of Cthulhu, but I’ve learned from bitter experience that such remarks generally only make things worse.

Blackstone’s Police Operational Handbook recommends the ABC of serious investigation: Assume nothing, Believe nothing, and Check everything.

But as the wise man said, life’s too short to drink bad wine. Regret is a terrible vintage.

CO19, the Met’s firearms unit, whose unofficial motto is, “Guns don’t kill people, we kill people with guns.

It was chintz but not the cat-lady chintz I was used to. Perhaps it was Mrs. Bellrush’s manner or steely blue eyes but I got the distinct impression that this was aggressive chintz, warrior chintz, the kind of chintz that had gone out to conquer an Empire and still had the good taste to dress for dinner. Any IKEA flat-pack that showed its face around here was going to be kindling.

One thing for certain, Abigail who lived up the road was going on my watch list. In fact I was going to create a watch list just so I could put Abigail at the top of it.

The first rule about a black woman’s hair is you don’t talk about a black woman’s hair. And the second rule is you don’t ever touch a black woman’s hair without getting written permission first.